Oil and natural gas producers, as well as others in the industry, have a critical need to know the locations of the most productive drilling opportunities. In fact, the location of a well is, in most cases, the most important single factor in the financial success of a well. Most of the efforts in petroleum geology and geophysics are aimed, ultimately, at this central question of what are the best locations to drill for oil and gas. The industry has developed many sophisticated systems and methodologies that attempt to answer this question, but do not provide a complete solution.
Most existing attempts to answer the question involve building a detailed geologic model of the subsurface strata using measurements collected from existing wells, seismic data, and knowledge about geologic processes that occur over millions of years. Sequence stratigraphy is an example of one strategy for building such a geologic model. These models help inform a company where to drill because they estimate certain variables that are typically important predictors of productive capacity of the well. Examples of such estimates variables are formation thickness, porosity, permeability and resistivity.
The existing strategies for building and interpreting geologic models are deficient when used to model areas larger than a few hundred square miles. Certain data, notably seismic data, may be unavailable or prohibitively expense to obtain for the larger areas. More importantly however, these models do not account for existing production in a consistent manner and fail to leverage statistical methods to estimate production based on the large number of data points available when a large area is being modeled. This results in models for existing strategies with lower predicting power. Thus, it is desirable to provide a system and method for predicting well locations that overcomes the above limitations of known systems and it is to this end that the disclosure is directed.